South Melbourne Hellas match programs

This project is one that I'd wanted to start for awhile, but it was only when Roy Hay gave me a stack of 30 odd match programs that he had salvaged from FFV's archives that I finally found a reason to do it. Thanks to everyone who has made these available, either on their own websites or by allowing me to scan them - including the aforementioned Roy Hay, Damian Smith, Chris Egan, The Agitator and The Man In The Stands, Ian Syson, and Todd Giles (Newcastle programs). Huge thanks in particular to The Agitator, the source of most of these match programs, who also scanned and collated many of them, so most of what I had to do was just upload them.

Anyone who wants to help add to the collection, please get in contact with me. If you are looking to send me match programs already in a pdf format, I would prefer you to send files where the images are the right way up (ie, not needing to be rotated). I am also happy to accept scanned images of match programs which have not been collated, as I am easily able to collate them into a pdf on my own computer.

Feel free to download and share these as widely as possible, as it's one of the main reasons I have uploaded them - to preserve and spread a part of our history.

Any document you download from this blog that has '(OCR)' at the end of its file name should work (to varying degrees) should you wish to search for keywords within the text. The technology isn't perfect however, and on some documents some words or parts of words may not come up in a document search - therefore you may need to be a little creative. Hopefully converting these files to an OCR format means that they will also be indexed by search engines.

1989Round 15, Marconi (away) - (originally scheduled as a round 16 game, Andrew Howe provides this note: Round 14 in the initial season fixture was to be played 15-16 April but the entire Round was later transferred to the end of the season with the hype around the Israel WC qualifier 16 April, so effectively the round numbers for all Rounds 15 onward were changed by -1)

A note on the Victorian Premier League and National Premier Leagues era - few clubs, including South Melbourne, bothered to create match programs even on an inconsistent basis, hence the paucity of materials for the following section. In some years, South created generic/all purpose match programs which were meant to cover all home games, with no match specific efforts produced.

21 comments:

The only game I remember going to in the post 1976 era (my father was not interested, and my uncle would occasionally take me until he returned to Greece in 1976), pre 1983 era (I was old enough to travel on my own) was the 1979 game against 'Macaroni' with my friends father. We got hammered 4 Nil and Ollerton missed a penalty.

Three Athanasiadis sisters. One of them got in contact with the club last year (I think she maybe lives in the States these days), so hopefully she remembers to bring her collection of photos to the club when she's in Australia in February.

Unfortunately the batch that I'm scanning and uploading at the moment does not include any material from the 1996/97 and 1997/98 seasons. Here's hoping one of our readers comes through with something, otherwise I may have to get access to the club's archives.

Phenomenal effort from The Agitator, every home and away programme from 1992/1993 bar Melita away and Preston away (the latter of which may not exist). Looking forward to more material, and glad to see others getting in contact with me about sharing match programmes and other historic Australian soccer materials.

Added 1975 Ringwood City Wilhelmina away (league) and 1980 Victorian women's cup final (Greensborough vs South Melbourne). These had been made available as uncollated images by The Man In The Stands - I've collated them into pdfs for the purposes of this project.

Nicknames in this case are meant to disassociate the clubs from their ethnic identities. In soccer at least, the idea has usually seemed to me to let the nicknames derive organically, but in Australian sport more generally (and especially from the 1970s onward) there has been a tendency to try and come up with nicknames/gimmicks for marketing purposes.

VFL and VFA clubs have a well documented history of deliberately changing their nicknames for all sorts of reasons - perception of effeminacy (fuschias, mayblooms), marketing (kangaroos, lions - see the latter's 1970s colour scheme change), or evn just to get onto the fad (Towners to Seagulls - n1930s; Brickfielders to Dragons)

For South, Hellas of course is both official (historically, in its founding and as the current name of the controlling company), unofficial (in that the name is almost never used for football matters, but still used by both our fans and our opponents), but you also have 'blues' (generic, but never caught on as much as it perhaps could have), but also the shorthand of 'South' has always been an easy linguistic substitute - someone in Melbourne soccer circles mentions 'South', most people will know which team they're talking about.

You may recall also that during the mid 1990s in Victoria, the Premier League clubs all adopted the same branding/logo style, adopting (usually) an animal nickname. Some of these were obvious (Preston, Bulleen) some less so. Port Melbourne still maintains both the logo and nickname, though most of the relevant clubs have moved on from either the logos, names or both.

Having said all of that, even the 'Greek' nicknames applied to lower level state league clubs weren't always there from the beginning, and only applied later on. For example Altona East started off in green and gold, because they figured they were in Australia, they may as well adopt Aussie colours!

Ange Postecoglou's letter about the Old and the New guard in Australian Soccer in 1998 has not been uploaded yet, but he appears to be 'worried' about the changing nature of the game, as he has another letter in the Home Match against Olympic about how old clubs are dying.

We've had a lot of fun over the years with my freewheeling comments policy, but all good things must come to an end. Therefore I will no longer be approving comments that contain personal abuse of any sort.

Still, if your post doesn't get approved straight away, it's probably because I haven't seen it yet.

As usual, publication of a comment does not mean endorsement of its content.